Our coach was so new you could tell just by looking at it. Four slides; weren’t many of those around. The big single piece windshield; that was distinctive; not many of those. Now, two years later, it’s not so special. It is still shiny and nice, but no so unique. Almost all new coaches have the big windshield and four slides. There are plenty of new coaches on the road now. We can look at twenty-year old motorhomes, and no matter how well they have been taken care of, you can tell they’re old. The designs have changed. They don’t have any slides. The windshields have a big bar down the middle. The resting position for the windshield wipers leaves them up in the driver’s view. Which leads us to wonder: what will coaches be like twenty years from now? We can see ourselves still in this coach in twenty years. People will see us driving by and tell their children, “Kids; that’s what motorhomes used to look like.”
Unexpected encounters
A late night moonlit walk in the dark by myself. On the trail down to the river, I can just barely make out a bicyclist at the side of the trail, working on a rear wheel by the light of a dim headlamp. I scuffled my feet on the sidewalk as I approached so I wouldn’t startle the person, stopped and made a sympathetic comment about having to work on a wheel in the dark. The bicycle rider burst into tears. She had crashed ten miles back and hurt her back. She was just trying to get home and the rear wheel came off as she was pedaling up the steep hill. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and thought a ride through Glenwood Canyon would be a good idea but she got caught out in the dark. She had just given up getting home on her own and called a friend to come pick her up at a nearby highway rest stop. There was nothing I could do to help so I listened. I walked her up the trail to the highway rest stop and listened some more. I didn’t feel good about leaving her there alone in the dark so, with her permission, I stayed and visited with her until help arrived. She wondered why I was in the vicinity and I told her about our life on the road. She reminisced about traveling the country in a VW Bus and I described the VW busses we’d had over the years: the 1966, 1972, and 1978 busses, culminating in the giant VW bus we drive today, big flat steering wheel in the front, engine roaring in the back; we just have a little more space between the two now. The real rescuers came and took her away. I finished my walk. When I got back Judy observed how long I had been gone and I got to tell her “I met a girl”. Yesterday, at our lunch stop on top of Vail Pass, a tour bus unloaded thirty-three tourists in our vicinity. They milled about, took a few pictures of the scenery, then migrated toward our coach. I ended up visiting for quite a while with the guys outside about the mechanics of the motorhome and tow car. All from Norway, some of them spoke English that I could understand and translated my answers to the remainder. While I was outside, Judy had begun giving tours inside. We opened up the slides so they could get the full effect. They had never seen anything like this in Norway. We didn’t get all thirty in the coach at once, but we got to share our story with an audience fascinated by its novelty to them. The tour bus left before we did, with waves from inside the windows all along our side. An interesting accumulation of events: our life on the road.
Along the way
I liked Shaffer’s response to the motorhome picture mystery: “I don’t have my plumbing license, but that stuff has never flowed uphill.”
Football
Okay, so maybe the Broncos are only the second best team in football.
College football
Actually, CU’s record isn’t 2 and 1, they’re 2 and 2, but what we really like is that they have a coach we can respect. After the string of liars and hypocrites CU has employed, Coach Hawkins appears to be a respectable human being. Maybe CU can have a successful coach who is also a responsible adult.